With ever more stringent demands placed upon the size, speed and power consumption of modern electronics, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are emerging as an attractive alternative to quartz crystals for applications requiring high performance timing signals and frequency references. Traditional (often competing) objectives in building oscillators based on these systems include minimizing external sources of noise (e.g. from sustaining circuitry), increasing quality factor Q and maximizing the power-handling capability of the resonator.
Conventional oscillators which use mechanical resonators do so by operating the mechanical resonator in a linear regime. Conventional wisdom dictates that nonlinearity is detrimental to oscillator performance. In addition to generating unwanted harmonics and providing the potential for chaotic operation, nonlinearity leads to mixing of 1/f-type noise onto the high frequency signal, degrading near-carrier phase noise.